


Release

by pyrrhical (anoyo)



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M, Spoilers: S3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-15
Updated: 2012-06-15
Packaged: 2018-09-30 14:37:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10165166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anoyo/pseuds/pyrrhical
Summary: "A house divided cannot stand."Vignettes of Damon over the years, starting in 1858 and ending in 2058. Really, about how perspective changes over time.Really really, Damon.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I started this back in 2012, so the canon takes place there (S3 end/S4 start).
> 
> I like it. I'm not sure why. 
> 
> Oh, wait, yes I do. Damon.

**1858**

“Have you read this nonsense?”

Damon looked up from when his father entered, startled. Giuseppe held a missive in his hand, waving it as though the paper itself were speaking the words which so bothered him.

“ _A house divided cannot stand._ ” Giuseppe snorted. “High-handed words! But to what house does the idiot refer, hm?” Giuseppe shook the paper again. Damon sat patiently, waiting for his father to run himself out. “He expects slavery to become unlawful, or the house shall fall down! Tell me son, are men half-free and half-slave today?”

Responding automatically, Damon said, “We are both free men.”

“Exactly! There are no men who are not free. Slaves are not men. At least, we cannot allow the notion that they _are_ men to become the prevailing one.” Giuseppe shook the paper again in disgust. “What would become of this country if we did?”

Having never considered that question, Damon didn’t answer. His father didn’t expect him to.

“You read through this carefully, son. Make sure your brother understands it when he returns from lessons. I’ve a mind to go see Lockwood about this.” Giuseppe dropped the paper atop the book Damon had been reading, exiting as promptly as he had entered.

Damon looked over the words on the paper, weighing their meaning heavily. Abraham Lincoln, a man running for Senator in Illinois, a place Damon had never visited, and did not expect ever to visit, had put words to paper that Damon did not know could express such sentiment.

He glanced throughout his father’s library of academic texts, worn and -- one-sided.

Perhaps he could do as his father wished while still understanding what this man had said. That seemed, to Damon, the most intelligent way to proceed.

**1901**

It surprised him, sometimes, how much the world looked the same -- and how much it didn’t. Damon had been a vampire now for longer than he had been human. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

At first, he could only feel two things: grief and rage. They were all-encompassing. They were his everything. 

Then he walked into the Library of Congress. And they told him about other national libraries, specific libraries, places he could do research -- and he thought, at least there would be something to do while he waited.

And he thought, maybe he could find the answer. Maybe he could find some way to get Katherine _back_. It was insane, and he knew it, but it was _something_ , and it was more than he had before.

What had been a pipe dream fueling his rage and grief became a real objective, and Damon added something new to his list of emotions: purpose. It was a subtle emotion, unnoticeable as a human, but it was there.

A part of him -- the still-human part -- questioned how far he would go, for that purpose.

At present, it would take him to the exhumation of a long-dead president to meet a guy who knew a guy, who might, maybe, just maybe, know where to look for a book that actually applied to undead problems.

As Damon watched Lincoln being exhumed, he considered the man carefully. Lincoln was a man who had felt purpose, even as a human. Felt it, been driven by it, and then been ended because of it. Damon knew, as he waited for God-or-whatever only knew who, that he would give just as much.

Maybe his cause wasn’t a country, but he’d already fought for one of those, and the last he’d checked, his side had lost.

And Damon was all right with that.

**1958**

“The scones are good here,” the voice said, in English, startling Damon out of his book. He couldn’t see the counter from where he was seated, at the very back of the pastry shop, but it took his brain negative time to place the voice that replied.

“I’ve never been one for scones,” Stefan said, tonelessly. “But I’ll take a coffee, if they make it.”

“Deux cafes, s’il voux plait,” the first voice said in flawless French. 

Fact: Stefan knows French. Damon was there when he learned it, helped him with his conjugations. That Stefan isn’t suavely stepping in and ordering or attempting to bully this girl could only mean one thing: she was a vampire, and Stefan was sober.

Damon hadn’t seen his brother in at least twenty years, but the last time he had, “sober” was not a word he would bring within a mile of Stefan. He meant that in every sense of the word: liquor, blood, insanity, Stefan had been drunk on all of it. And people had the temerity to talk down to _him_ , like Stefan was a saint.

The girl spotted him first. She was blonde, dressed comfortably and fashionably, and obviously old blood. Damon could appreciate her surety. He gave her a grin in acknowledgement, setting the chances that Stefan would outright ignore him at a solid five out of ten. Unless Stefan’s sobriety program included a step for confronting people you hate and avoid the shit out of, what had initially been a morning for coffee and reading -- the sort of thing you do when your life doesn’t revolve around revenge, and anger, and pain, and you’ve maybe started to try to move on -- should have been allowed to stay that way.

Unfortunately, Damon had forgotten how very _Stefan_ Stefan had a tendency to be.

“Damon,” Stefan said, tone barely escalating in his voice, but his posture pulling into something wary as he turned the corner after his friend with both of their coffee. “What are you doing here?”

There was suspicion in his voice. Of course there was. Why wouldn’t there be? Damon did, occasionally, very occasionally -- all right, there had been a period where it had been a hobby -- show up simply to fuck with Stefan’s day. But he hadn’t done that in thirty years. Even then, it had been after a particularly bad dead end. Damon had once drunkenly given it the rationale of vampire brother bonding, but he’d eat a sock before he’d ever say that aloud. 

“Having coffee, little brother,” Damon replied. “Same as you. Only, you’ll note, I got here first. Being as I’m not psychic, I’m going to have to say I’m not stalking you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Stefan tensed further. “Okay,” he said, clearly nowhere near _okay_. “But what are you doing in Nice?”

Damon resisted sighing in frustration. It would not become him. He had a carefully cultivated image, after all -- or, at least, he was working on one. “I’ve been here for a week. I’m visiting the library.” He raised an eyebrow. “Did you know, little brother, that Nice is one of the oldest human settlements in Europe?”

“The library,” Stefan said, voice incredulous, but Damon could see that his shoulders had relaxed. There was no keeping Damon from books; that had been fact through both their lives. “Are you looking for something in particular?”

“My eyes are always open,” Damon said, shrugging. This particular brand of crazy was all Damon’s. He was perfectly content to let Stefan wallow in his own grief, and find his own ways to the surface. The parts of him -- gaping wounds in him -- that blamed Stefan for Katherine’s death couldn’t allow him to do anything else. Truth be told, he really wasn’t in Nice for that sort of research. He had a meeting with someone who was doing some digging for him, but that wasn’t for another week, and it was in Paris. Nice was just for Damon. He’d simply never been.

Stefan was still standing with the coffees, though his friend had sit down, and was watching the conversation with a fixed, neutral expression. Damon knew what Stefan wanted him to do, and he knew what Stefan expected him to do. The question was which would be better in the long run.

Some days, _now_ was the long run. Damon snapped his book shut and stood, slowly making his way out of the pastry shop and past Stefan and his companion. “Well, I do believe the library will be opening for the day now. You and your lady friend enjoy your coffee, Stefan.” Damon turned to smile at the blonde. “And for the record, he did once enjoy scones. Cinnamon, particularly. But only when they were made with rather more butter than is healthy; he just thinks regular scones are too hard.”

“Why, thank you,” the blonde said. “I’ll remember that. I’m Lexi, by the way,” she said, waving her fingers lightly. Damon could practically hear Stefan scowl.

“Damon,” he replied. “I’m sure you’ll enjoy Nice. It’s a great city. Good for relaxing.” He turned and raised an eyebrow at Stefan. “And testing impulses.” Before Stefan could reply, he left.

The library was, in fact, worth it.

**2001**

There comes a time in every man’s life where all the lights go out, the stars go dim, the plants seem to shrivel at his feet, and -- well, the like.

Damon had had many instances that he thought were, successively, that instance. Each time he was proven wrong, by himself, finding a deeper, darker cavern to crawl into.

He could go entire decades without finding that deep, dark place, and then a switch would flip, and in he would fall.

The day he reread his journals was one of those days. He thought, I’ll compile everything I have on the fire at the church. 

He thought, I’ll really see what I know, and what I can do.

And then he saw: I know nothing, and I can do less than nothing. Not only did he not know anything, it was just that what little he had collected was unfathomable gibberish. He hadn’t met anyone who could translate some parts, interpret other parts, or insane combinations of the two in other cases. Damon was a brilliant man -- perhaps one of the most brilliant men in the world, considering the sheer quantity of knowledge floating around his skull -- but even he couldn’t make thousand-year-old scribblings come to life.

He had been searching for one hundred years, and he had found exactly nothing. One hundred years of his not-life had been spent on absolutely fuck-all. 

He thought, now what?

All he had at hand was a bottle of single-malt. It was a start.

**2058**

“What are you writing?”

Damon looked up from where he was journaling to see Stefan standing in the doorway to the study, arms crossed and a small smile on his face. Damon quirked an eyebrow at him and twirled his pen. “The epic love song of Caroline Forbes, obviously,” he replied, deadpan.

Stefan laughed. “I’m sure Caroline would appreciate that. In fact, do that, for her anniversary. Then Dickens it, hat and all.” His smile went soft around the edges, and Damon resisted the urge to tease his brother. “I seem to recall you being very good at that.”

“It would be pretty fantastic,” Damon agreed, imagining Caroline’s face, while seeing in the background a faded picture of a very, very young Stefan, paying rapt attention to his brother, reciting a new short story -- or an old favorite -- by the fire.

“Anyway,” Stefan said, clapping his hands together, “what I came to ask was: are you coming with us to Ric’s grave? I think we’re going to go lay flowers now.”

Damon looked down at the page he had been penning. It was, perhaps, as done as it would ever be. “Yeah, I’m coming.” 

As he and Stefan descended the stairs, they met the rest of the group, as calm and cheerful as they had been in years. It seemed strange, to Damon, that the anniversary of Ric’s death would ever stop being painful, but it had. Good memories had erased the bad.

Apparently, that was what developing healthy emotional release mechanisms did for you. Damon wasn’t going to say that he was an emotional beacon of courage, or that he didn’t occasionally fall down the world’s stupidest well, but -- closure and progress were great things.

When they reached the grave, Elena started, saying a few simple words, and then Jeremy followed her.

Damon took his turn somewhere in the middle. He stepped up, and pulled out the sheet of paper he had penned earlier.

“Hey, buddy,” he said. “I figured I ought to finally say something worth saying. So, here goes. I’m trying not to confuse sadness with regret. You know me -- I can take one thing and turn it into another in the blink of an eye. But I’ve come to learn, in all the years I knew you, and all the years since then, that sadness and regret are not the same thing. It’s amazing that it took me this long, and I really give you that credit. There are a lot of things that happened between us that maybe shouldn’t have. Maybe they had to, to get to where we are now, or maybe they were the result of fate. Who the hell knows? But I’ve learned that just because I’m sad, it doesn’t mean I need to regret anything. Regret festers. It discolors everything. I don’t regret anything we did. Not even the stupid shit. I’m sure there are a few things you wish I might, but they helped me to learn, too. You were a great man, and you taught me one of the greatest things I’ll ever know: how to be a friend. So I can be sad, but I don’t regret a damn thing.”


End file.
